Only in tracing Falstaff (Ashley McGuire) and Hal’s relationship do we miss the comic scenes of Part II, the casual back-and-forth intimacy that is so brutally cut short by the prince’s “I know thee not, old man” speech. There’s a lot of material condensed here, but the overriding sense is not one of loss but of pace, focus. Laddish and vulnerable, Dunne is the central point in a text that conflates both Henry IV Part I and Henry IV Part II (though dominated by the former), allowing us to follow the young prince from hooligan to monarch in a continuous two-hour arc She faces off against Clare Dunne’s Hal – a world away from the actress’s Portia. In her delivery, Shakespeare becomes the artful contemporary language of the street – its martial posturing at once absolutely faithful and gloriously reinvented. Restless and rangy, striking her words like a percussionist, Jade Anouka flings her Hotspur at us with joyous ferocity. There’s a pleasant friction to hearing the insults of the battlefield and tavern – “like a sick a girl” “a woman’s mood” “you are a woman, go” – in the mouths of this muscular, assertive troupe of women, each claiming so much more than just linguistic territory in their dramatic invasion into one of Shakespeare’s most masculine plays. A tale of nationhood, identity and friendship gains particular poignancy in the mouths of the disenfranchised, the grey-tracksuited masses lost in the margins of the history books.
Jade Anouka flings her Hotspur at us with joyous ferocityīut in other respects Lloyd’s prison-setting holds up well. The result is both less psychologically sustained and less immersive – oddly so, given the transformation of the Donmar itself into a “Secure Facility” for the duration, with audience marched into the auditorium single-file, supervised by uniformed guards. “We agreed we weren’t going to do this fucking bit,” rails Mistress Quickly after Falstaff insults her in their quarrel “This isn’t your scene,” shouts Henry IV when two inmates mock his climactic encounter with Hal. While Julius Caesar rarely broke its theatrical frame, allowing the audience to dissolve the two worlds of Rome and the prison into one emotional arc, here Lloyd seems more anxious to rupture than foster this unity. Incarcerating us once again in a women’s prison, can the power of Lloyd’s conceit survive a second outing?